Staying Midwestern

I’m suffering from an identity crisis. I suppose that sounds more dramatic than it is, but there are ramifications to my confusion. I write these blog posts as a Midwestern Nomad.  Even though I remain nomadic, there is now some question about whether I’m midwestern.  My recent relocation causes this conundrum. Let me back up and start at the beginning.

As my wife and I were leaving our winter retreat in Georgia this year, we had one of those fork-in-the-road discussions that changed life’s direction.  We love Sioux Falls, we adore our friends there, and our medical providers have been fantastic.  Our downtown condominium was beautiful and convenient.  But! (This is where the road forked.) We lived a long way from any of our children. As we talked, it became clear that we were envious of our Sioux Falls friends who lived within minutes of their children’s homes.  It’s one thing to visit your children and another to live near them with access to all their activities. At the forefront of the conversation was the lobbying campaign our Wyoming son and his family had embarked on to convince us to relocate to Sheridan. By the time we got back to Sioux Falls this February, we had decided to take the western fork of our discussion and head for Wyoming.

As we started our online search for a new place to live, I jokingly said to my wife, “Let’s move to Sheridan next month.”  I delight in torturing her that way, and she rewarded me with a splendid squawk that rattled the rafters. Once again, I proved that heaven can play a bit rough with us jokesters.  Suddenly, an apartment perfect for our needs appeared on the Sheridan housing market, and we could have it, provided we took possession by mid-March.  Stumbling through existential whiplash, we packed and moved to a stunning view of the Big Horn Mountains just over a month from my sadistic verbal prank on my wife.

I’m still trying to make sense of it all.  Sheridan is roughly a tenth the size of Sioux Falls, but its topography makes cross-town travel much more interesting than the regular grid of streets from a midwestern city.  Still, we have been able to find our way to grocery stores and . . . ahem . . . sporting goods outlets.  The uniform speed limit of 30 miles per hour is worming its way into my conscience, and the ever-pleasant Sheridan constabulary is there to help if it doesn’t.   Perhaps the most tenuous adjustment is living with the moniker “Goose Creek” on the town’s primary waterway. I realize it’s a shameless pun, but I keep thinking of the tributary’s name as a verb.  Maybe I need a good poke in the derrière to get over it.

Our story now arrives at an experiential crossroads.  Every map I look at places Wyoming firmly outside the traditional boundaries of the American Midwest.  As I look out our front window at the jagged Black Tooth peak in the Bighorns, I’ve got to agree with Dorothy Gale, “We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.” So why do I still feel Midwestern? Perhaps the Wizard of Oz is a valuable paradigm here. You can take Dorothy out of Kansas, but you can’t take Kansas out of Dorothy.  The black and white of Kansas was home to Dorothy, not the full color of Oz.  She orients her life around family, not adventure. I’m not averse to the adventure Wyoming brings, but I’m more inclined to wear Orvis wading shoes than ruby slippers. I’m still firmly attached to Midwestern culture and will likely remain that way for the duration.

An article published in the Wall Street Journal last January makes it plain that I’m not alone in this pleasant delusion. In the article, “It’s Amazing How Many Americans Think They Live in the Midwest When They Don’t (January 19, 2024),” the WSJ says that 54% of us folks in Wyoming think we’re living in the Midwest.  If my math is correct, that puts us in the majority. It’s just a surreal version of the Midwest with 35 peaks in the state above 13,000 feet.  Also, you can buy ethanol in your gas here, so the corn fields can’t be far away.  The WSJ goes on to identify the Midwest as “a swath radiating out from the traditional Midwest as the ‘Friendly & Conventional region.’”  I think this is the secret to my problem. The cultural shape of “friendly and conventional” has everything to do with my emotional geography.  I believe it is unlikely that I will ever become a cowboy beyond cheering for the University of Wyoming football team. Yet, I share a commitment to hard work and fairness that strongly influences Wyoming’s cowboyness. Not only is it both conventional and friendly, but the direct way of speaking is generally honest, even if it sheds any semblance of  Midwestern-nice. It sounds like anything you could hear on a South Dakota ranch or a Kansas farm, even if the drawl is slightly different.  Most midwesterners would be pretty comfortable in Wyoming’s culture once they got done gawking at the mountains.

So, this brings us to the crux of the matter.  At its heart, I’m convinced that being midwestern is more about a cultural outlook than geography.  It’s a culture that arose from the hard work of generations of folks living close to the land in our country’s big, flat places.  Small communities and rural lifestyles seasoned it into an identifiably unique way of life marked by pragmatism and centered on the family. Its drawbacks include an incipient passive aggressiveness and a stodgy resistance to novelty. But even so, it has served as a kind of sea anchor for American society.  When I look in the mirror, I see a midwesterner.  I don’t think that will change no matter where I live, and I’m okay with that.

So now I’m a midwesterner living in Wyoming.  I still have to navigate around the same kind of giant pickups in the Walmart parking lot I did when I was living in South Dakota. McDonald’s in Sheridan tastes the same as McDonald’s in Sioux Falls. Even though the thunderheads pop over the Big Horns in surprising ways when I’m used to watching stormy weather stalk in from the west for hours, the wind blows just as hard and the rain is just as wet in Wyoming. As I stare up into the deep blue high plains sky at the distant airline contrails, I know that, like the rest of the Midwest, they fly over Wyoming too.  I still live where many in our nation prefer to look down upon. I rest my case.